GeneraOwen WebbTeam Lead, Core Product, Rilla
A personal note for Owen

Owen, build Genera.

You now lead Rilla's core product team while staying close to customers and the code. Before that, you built backend and data systems at Flipboard scale, and your public work shows real conviction about where AI is headed. That mix of product instinct, technical range, and emerging leadership is what Genera needs in an Eng Lead: someone to own the US team, shape the architecture, and build with AI at the core.

Why you caught our eye
Rapid progression
Engineer I → Team Lead at Rilla
10M+
Monthly users reached by code you shipped at Flipboard
75%
ETL runtime you cut rebuilding Flipboard's data pipeline
Your experience × the role

Your experience, matched to the role

What the Eng Lead role needs
Where you've already done it
A hands-on builder shipping great enterprise products
You ship inside Rilla's AI product as it expands across new product lines, and at Flipboard you pushed production code at consumer scale. You've never stopped being in the codebase.
Architectural judgment at startup scale
You rebuilt Flipboard's ETLs on Spark, Airflow, and MSK to materially improve runtime, then streamlined deploys with Helm, Terraform, and AWS. Those are the infrastructure calls Genera will lean on as it scales across SF and Bangalore.
Deeply curious about building in the age of AI
You write publicly about frontier models, ChatGPT Vision, RAG vs. fine-tuning, buy-vs-build AI, and won first place at the NYC Defense Tech Hackathon. You reason about AI, you don't just call the API.
Thrives in ambiguity, brings an adventurous spirit
A D-III College World Series ballplayer who carried a dual Engineering + CS degree at Swarthmore at the same time. You've performed under pressure and figured out hard things in parallel before.
Ready to lead, mentor, and grow a team
Years TA-ing and tutoring CS at Swarthmore, fast-earned trust through Rilla's engineering ranks, and now direct team leadership show a builder's instinct for bringing others along. This is the right moment to widen that scope.
Why Genera is worth the conversation

Founders who know the problem, backed to win

Genera is building AI agents that let enterprise software teams run every deployment like it’s their most critical customer, doing the deep discovery, configuration, and testing work of world-class Forward Deployed Engineers at superhuman speed. It’s a real, unglamorous, valuable problem, and the team going after it has actually lived it.

You'd work directly with Will, who's hiring for this role

Will Patterson (Co-Founder & CEO) was an early PM at Clari who built multiple products from scratch into $10M+ ARR lines, ran M&A across three acquisitions in three years, and owned AI strategy across the portfolio, plus a stint teaching product design at Stanford. He's the one you'll be building with day to day.

And James, who wrote the playbook on deployment

James Honsa was employee #12 at Ironclad, its first Forward Deployed Engineer, and built the deployment function that scaled customers from $400K to $150M+ ARR. Will and James were Stanford classmates, 15 years of trust behind the company.

Backed to win early

A Seed led by First Round Capital, with BoxGroup, WndrCo, and founders/execs from OpenAI, Microsoft, Ironclad, Clari, and Anrok. Serious conviction behind a small, experienced team.

A real lead seat, not a title

You'd lead Genera's US engineering team through the next phase of growth, shipping product, owning architecture, and shaping how the team builds in the age of AI, while partnering closely with the Bangalore team and its Eng Lead. The 0→1 leadership chapter you've been working toward.

A market moving toward Genera

As enterprise AI companies add forward-deployed and implementation talent, deployment remains a constraint on growth. Genera is building for that bottleneck while the category is still taking shape, giving a small team the chance to define how the work gets done.

Operating experience, turned into product

Genera isn't a thesis off a slide. Both founders lived this work before they built the company, James running deployment inside a fast-scaling enterprise software company, Will shipping products next to design partners and carrying six-figure deals at Clari. They kept hitting the same wall, so they set out to build the system they wished they'd had.

Life at Genera

We build hard and protect a full life

James recently shared how we use dinners to build community with the deployment leaders on the front lines of enterprise AI. But at Genera, sharing meals isn’t only a category-building strategy. It’s a core part of how we work. Building something from nothing is hard, and the founders are deliberate about the rituals that keep us human while we do it.

The Genera team out to dinner together in San Francisco

Tuesday team dinners, a.k.a. “Weird Lunch”

Once a week, no matter what, we stop in the evening to eat dinner together. The one rule for whoever's picking (the “dinner dictator”): it has to be something that would be weird to eat for lunch. Some nights we talk about the latest model release, more often it's K-pop, Veblen goods, or parenting wisdom.

Celebrating the wins, together

We mark milestones with a shared meal and a toast to every Generator who made the win happen. The most recent was a team dinner in SF, celebrating a new milestone customer.

High standards, with room for life

Many of us are parents, so we know that doing the best work of your career and keeping a full life outside it are not a trade-off. We build flexibility and respect for time away from the keyboard into how the team works.

The moment
Every high-growth company is racing to hire Forward Deployed Engineers, and every one of them hits a capacity wall. That wall is the opportunity.
The bet behind Genera, agents that do the routine work of world-class deployment teams at superhuman scale
First Round
Led the Seed round
Clari
Where Will built multi-product & AI strategy before founding Genera
Ironclad #12
Where James built the deployment function
SF + Blr
US team you'd lead, partnered with Bangalore

Worth a conversation, Owen?

No pressure and no formal process to start, just 30 minutes with Will to talk through the role, the technical problems, and whether this is the right next chapter for you.

Will PattersonTalk to Will, who's hiring for this roleWill Patterson, Co-Founder & CEO, GeneraSee what Genera is building
Genera

© 2026 Genera. All rights reserved. Terms & Privacy Policy